The Voortrekker Republics and British Policies

The Voortrekkers established two states in the 1840s and the 1850s:
the Orange Free State between the Orange and the Vaal rivers and the
South African Republic (Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek, a union of four
Boer republics founded by the Voortrekkers) to the north of the Vaal
River in the area later constituting the Transvaal. Like the Africans
among whom they settled, the Voortrekkers in both states made their
living from a combination of extensive pastoralism and hunting. Ivory
was the most important product at first, and the search for it
engendered great competition between African and European hunters. In
the 1860s, ostrich feathers also became an important export. All
processed foods and manufactured goods were acquired by trading ivory,
skins, and feathers to British merchants at the Cape.

Politically, the two states were republics, with constitutions
modeled in part on that of the United States, each with a president, an
elected legislature, and a franchise restricted to white males. Africans
could not vote, or own land, or carry guns because the laws of both
republics, unlike those of the British colonies, did not recognize
racial equality before the law. By the end of the 1860s, there were
approximately 50,000 whites settled in the two republics, practically
all of them living in rural areas, although small capitals had been
established at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State and at Pretoria in
the South African Republic.

Initially, the British attempted to strengthen their own position by
extending colonial control beyond the Cape Colony's boundaries. In 1848,
after the northern frontier was threatened by fighting between
Voortrekkers and Griqua on the Orange River and by continued competition
for resources among settlers and Africans, the governor of the Cape
Colony, Sir Harry Smith, annexed all the land between the Orange and the
Vaal rivers. This area, which the British called the Orange River
Sovereignty, comprised large numbers of Voortrekker communities and
practically all of the Sotho state, Lesotho. Smith, urged on by
land-hungry white settlers, also annexed the Xhosa lands between the
Keiskama and the Great Kei rivers that the British had first taken and
then returned in 1835 and 1836. Moreover, he sought to win a decisive
military victory over the Xhosa and to break forever the power of their
chiefs by pursuing a ruthless war against them from 1850 to 1852.

The British had mixed success. Their attempts to tax the Orange River
Voortrekkers produced almost no revenue. Claims to Sotho lands were met
with opposition from Moshoeshoe, who in 1851 and 1852 successfully
defeated British attempts to extend their authority into his lands. As a
result of the Sotho resistance, the British decided to withdraw from the
Highveld, but in so doing they recognized the primacy of European rather
than African claims to the land. The Sand River Convention of 1852 and
the Bloemfontein Convention of 1854 recognized the independence of the
South African Republic and the Orange Free State, respectively, as
Voortrekker republics so long as their residents agreed to acknowledge
the ultimate sovereignty of the British government, agreed not to allow
slavery in their territories, and agreed not to sell ammunition to
Africans. It was not until 1868 that the British again attempted to
extend their power onto the Highveld, and that was only when Lesotho's
defeat by the Orange Free State was so complete that the total
destruction of the Sotho people seemed likely.

On the eastern Cape frontier, however, British policies brought about
enormous destruction for the Xhosa. Smith was recalled by the British
government in 1852 for instigating conflict with the Xhosa, but the
Colonial Office decided to pursue the war to victory nonetheless in
1853. Large areas of Xhosa land were annexed, and thousands of head of
cattle were confiscated. Drought and disease further reduced the Xhosa's
remaining herds. Defeated in war, their lands greatly reduced and food
supplies in decline, the Xhosa turned for salvation to a young girl,
Nongqawuse, who prophesied that if the people purified themselves
through sacrifice--by destroying their cattle and their grain, and by
not planting new crops--then their ancestors would return to aid them,
the herds would reappear, and all the whites would be driven into the
sea. Although not all Xhosa believed the prophecies, by 1857 more than
400,000 head of cattle had been killed and vast quantities of grain had
been destroyed. As a result, 40,000 Xhosa died from starvation, and an
equal number sought refuge in the Cape Colony, where most became
impoverished farm laborers.

By the end of the 1860s, white settlement in South Africa was much
more extensive than it had been at the beginning of the century. There
were now two British colonies on the coast (Cape Colony and Natal)
instead of one, and two Voortrekker republics on the southern and the
northern Highveld (the Orange Free State and the South African Republic)
(see fig. 6). The white population had also increased considerably, from
the 20,000 or so Europeans resident in the Cape Colony in 1800 to
180,000 reported in the 1865 census. There were another 18,000 whites
living in Natal and perhaps 50,000 more whites in the Voortrekker
states.

Yet there were evident constraints to growth. Economically, South
Africa was little different from what it had been when the British first
arrived. The Cape produced wine, wheat, and wool, none of them
particularly profitable items on the world market in the 1860s,
especially because of competition from American, Argentine, and
Australian farmers. Natal's sugar kept the colony going, but it was not
an expanding industry. In the interior, the Voortrekkers engaged in the
same economic activities as their African neighbors--pastoralism,
limited cultivation of grain crops, and hunting--and whereas these
provided a living for the people involved, they were not the basis on
which an expanding economy could be built. Perhaps the best indicator of
the limited attractions of South Africa's economy was the fact that
fewer Europeans emigrated there than to the United States, Canada,
Australia, or even New Zealand.

Moreover, areas of white and black settlement and political control
were largely separate. In 1865 the Cape contained 200,000 Khoikhoi and
people of mixed ancestry (the basis of today's coloured population), as
well as 100,000 Bantu speakers. Several hundred thousand blacks lived in
Natal and in the Voortrekker republics. The vast majority of South
Africa's black inhabitants, however, continued to live in independent
African states ruled by their own kings and chiefs. In the 1860s,
Mpande's Zululand was a still powerful state in which most Zulus lived.
Moshoeshoe's Lesotho, although it had been attacked by the Orange Free
State and its borders contracted, contained most of the Sotho people. To
the northeast of the South African Republic, the Pedi under their king
Sekhukhune had a well-armed state, and the Swazi kingdom continued to be
a powerful entity. Any observer traveling in South Africa in the late
1860s would have had little reason to assume that this balance of power
between blacks and whites would change dramatically during the remainder
of the nineteenth century.